Degrees of Latency of Ecological Discourse Agent (A Case Study of British Online Newspapers)

Abstract

This article proposes a study of degrees of latency of the agent, which is a semantic role performed by a participant of the communicative situation described in a sentence; this role correlates with the instigator of the action. The agent can be expressed explicitly, so that everybody understands who the action is performed by, or in a hidden, latent way. Drawing on Goatly’s (2018) research which demonstrates that degrees of agent’s latency can vary, we modify his scale of latency by taking into consideration non-verbal (visual) means. A great societal concern for environmental issues around the globe nowadays, together with the ecolinguistic vector of this research account for its timeliness. The purpose of this research is to identify the degrees of latency of the agent of environmental discourse. Syntactic constructions, lexical units, and visual images that render the agent were chosen as the object-matter of analysis, while the degrees of latency – as its subject-matter. The methods comprise general scientific methods, such as induction and deduction, synthesis and analysis, observation and contrast, as well as linguistic methods proper: critical discourse analysis, semantic analysis, and multimodal analysis. The sample is selected from online versions of most widely read British newspapers, both broadsheets and tabloids, The Guardian and Metro respectively. A modified scale of degrees of agent’s latency is suggested, where six categories of linguistic means are differentiated according to the degree of their latency. Explicit predication is characterized by a zero degree of latency; its measure increases in grammatical constructions, tropes, nominalizations, ellipsis, and indefinite agent respectively. The prospects of this research lie in comparison and quantitative counts of the agent’s latency in different types of British media.